Series: The Internet - An Interim (part I)

What has internet turned out to be for us until today?
I can speak only for me and that's probably a major distinguishment that has to be made first and furthermore one of the most important influences in order to answer this question.
The internet is like every big aglomeration of knowledge only as usefull as a person is aware of it's potentials and is able to access them. For me, as having no guess about how a web page is build up nor about how to generate and use a data bank, ´the´ internet would be limited on consuming content others provide. This would degenerate it for most people to a better television system, with supply, i.e. content, being limited as only a small percentage of people would know how to `drive` this `information-machine´. But, blogs, social networks of whatever kind and most important easy to use software for building web pages have opened up this - until then for the masses - closed door to share what you want to say and or what you know with more than those people you could directly reach by phone, letter or at speakers corner.
The latest and until then probably most powerful example has been observed during the election in Iran and the following protests against the results, and the violence against protesters. Thousands of Iranians `shared` their `knowledge`, respectively their experiences, with the world. I think this was one of the first and yet the most powerful presentation of what the internet is able to mean in the future. The distinguishment between reality and cyberspace is, as was shown, actually not existing. It's only that mankind had not yet discovered this connection. Maybe the easiest comparison can be drawn to natural sciences like physics, were mankind is very aware of it's restricted knowledge and thus has set up a system based on theory and falsification, i.e. a theory is accepted as the most suitable explanation for a phenomenon only as long as it is falsificated or replaced by another theory which provides a better, e.g. more precise explanation. This might be a good way to deal with the internet and it's possibilities as well. Maybe we should not limit our understanding of the internet on a theoretical-technical construct built upon a client- and netstructure, i.e. different clients like computers (thus users), being connected via cable, wifi or satelite, as this view is limited on the exisiting thought that sharing information is the main duty of the internet.
It is actually way more. It takes a direct influence on the way people see the world, as it changes our understanding of borders within this world. As it was the case for the invention of the steam engine, people broadened their horizont above the borders of their towns and countries and spinning the story on, people will one day broaden their horizont over the border of this planet. But this was and is a process. It both takes several decades to be able to make distinctions between single steps of this progress and until people realize the whole range of possibilities that come alonge with such a fundamental new technology. The invention of electric light may be pulled up as another, recent (as conventional lamps are baned in the EU since September 1st 2009) exapmle to picture this progessive and interchanging character, which technology and civilization contract. The initial step was an idea transformed into a technology, but the further and fundamental steps were and are made in connection with people.
In this sense, the internet has acutally just begun to change our lifes, as we are about the first generation to use it in daily practise in nearly every situation, starting with the exchange of information via an email instead of making a call, using online databases instead of libraries and ending with myspace and youtube-parties where everybody can present his latest discoveries of music. The next possible steps are already there but have not yet leaked through to the mass. Companies focusing on the expansion of route guidance systems out of cars and upon everybodies' mobile phone are looking for intensively for staff despite the crisis, and first applications are already in use: the Berlin-based company `aka-aki`(www.aka-aki.com)offers an application for mobile phones which detects and shows everybody you know (or might know as a friend of a friend), whenever this person is in your closer environment (see e.g. the aricle on www.timesonline.co.uk)
Despite the scarry possibilities of misuse (e.g. in situations like the one described in Iran), this technology might be another approval for the mentioned statement that reality and web are in fact not two distinguishable worlds but undergo constant exchange and were merged since the moment of the first pictures of the coffee machine at Cambridge University.